Slim-to-Win winners stayed away from their namesake

A father-daughter team named after one of the most fattening concoctions ever created in North America took home the top prize Sunday in the Morey Foundation’s 2013 Slim to Win contest.

Dr. Vincent Dube and Dr. Nathalie Dube lost a combined 130.4 pounds, or 34.3 percent of their starting body weight, to take home the $6,000 first prize.

The team called itself Poutine Power, and Nathalie Dube said the name celebrated the family’s French-Canadian heritage.

“It’s a recipe from Quebec,” Vincent Dube said. “It’s French fries, cheese curds and gravy. If you eat that, there is no way to lose weight.”

The elder Dube is an anesthesiologist at McLaren Central Michigan; his daughter is a Mt. Pleasant dentist in private practice. She lost 30.77 percent of her body weight with a combination of diet and exercise since the initial weigh-in Jan. 2; he lost 37.12 percent.

“This is a very big life change for both us, and we’re going to stick to it,” Nathalie Dube said.

“It was mostly our diet,” Nathalie Dube said. “The exercise, of course, is not easy, but to us, it was the easier part of it.”

Massive portions of rich, buttery foods went away. Huguette Debe, Vincent Dube’s wife and Nathalie Dube’s mother, said she changed entirely the way she cooked.

“Very, very low calories,” she said. “Nice portions.”

Nathalie Dube said she and her father looked very closely at how they related to food, and how much that relationship to food had changed in just four months. Vincent Dube said pretty much everything had changed.

“The way of life, the way we eat and the exercise we do,” he said. He had triple-bypass heart surgery eight years ago, and he says after losing all that weight and beginning a strong exercise regimen, he feels more like he’s 40 than 68.

“We’d been talking for more than five years that we want to go to the Grand Canyon, and hike and camp,” Nathalie Dube said. “When I saw the competition, I said, ‘Dad, I think this is our time.’”

The Morey Foundation’s Lon Morey said 106 teams weighed iin January. The prize money is a strong incentive to get started.

The 2012 competition drew concerns that it’s often harder for women to lose weight than it is for men, so to make the competition more fair, the foundation changed the competition to a team event – with one man and one woman per team.

Successive weigh-ins trimmed down the field as the contestants slimmed down. On Sunday, the final four teams weighed in, looking for the largest percentage of body weight loss.

Second place went to Amy Bunting and John Bunting, who called themselves Weapons of Mass Reduction. They lost 121 pounds, or 28.9 percent of their body weight.

The third place finishers were Ah Mad House, Carol House and Ahmad Alkhatib, who lost a combined 137.6 pounds, or 28.76 percent. Fourth place finishers were Team Flaming Bunny, Kate Reasoner and Josh Reasoner, down more than 113 pounds, and 25.03 percent of their weight.

Teams trained with trainers from Morey Courts and McLaren Fitness.

“We randomly picked which facility they’d work with,” Morey said. “We had a little side competition going on here.”

All the teams and participants have a second-chance weigh-in on Aug. 4.

Mark Ranzenberger is the online editor of TheMorningSun.com. He can be reached at mranzenberger@michigannewspapers.com.